Over all hung Indian summer and the happy sunshine.  Eugenia, rising at daybreak for a gallop across country, would feel the dew in her face and the autumn in her blood.  As she dashed over fences and ditches to the unploughed pasture, the morning was as desolate as midnight—­not a soul showed in the surrounding fields and the long road lay as pallid as a streak of frost.  The loneliness and the hour set her eyes to dancing and the glad blood to bounding in her veins.  When a startled rabbit shied from the brushwood she would slacken her speed to watch it, and when, as sometimes chanced, she frightened a covey of partridges from their retreat, she went softly, rejoicing that no shot was near.

At this time she was possessed, perhaps, of a spirit too elastic, of a buoyance almost insolent—­she turned, as it were, too round a cheek to Fate.  In her clear purity romanticism held no part, and her soul, strong to adhere, was slow to conform.  Her nature was straight as an arrow that would not fall though it overshot the mark.  She dreamed scant dreams of the future because she clove tenaciously to the past—­to the rare associations and the old affections—­to the road and the cedars and the Hall as to the men and women whose blood she bore and whose likeness she carried.  She loved one and all with a fidelity that did not swerve.  Riding home along the open road that led to the cedars, she marked each friendly object in its turn—­on one side the persimmon tree where the fruit ripened—­on the other the blackened wreck of the giant oak, towering above the shining spread of life-everlasting.  She noted that the rail fence skirting the pasture sagged at one corner beneath a weight of poisonous oak, that a mud hole had eaten through the short strip of “corduroy” road, and that where Uncle Ish’s path led to his cabin the plank across the gully was rapidly rotting.  She saw these things with the tender eyes with which we mark decay in one beloved.

Then, pacing up the avenue to the gravelled walk, she would call “good-morning” to the general and leap lightly to the ground, fresh as the day, bright as the autumn.

It was on one of these early rides that she saw Nicholas again.  She was returning leisurely through the stretch of woodland, when, catching sight of him as he swung vigorously ahead, she quickened her horse’s pace and overtook him as he glanced inquiringly back.

“Divide the worm, early bird,” she cried gaily.

He paused as she did, laying his hand on the horse’s neck.

“There wasn’t but one and you got it,” he retorted lightly.  “Have you been far?”

“Miles, and I’m as hungry as two bears.  Have you anything in your pocket?”

Her glowing face rose against a background of maple boughs, which surrounded her like a flame.  The mist of the morning was on her lips and her eyes were shining.  He felt her beauty leap like wine to his brain, and he set his teeth and looked blankly down the road.